Susan Ann Ragland Hewell was probably born in Halifax County, Virginia, on December 29, 1825 (or 1827). She was the daughter of Dr. Dabney Camp and Ann Bolling Vaughan Hewell. The Hewell family was residing in Marengo County, Alabama, in 1840. The Hewells, including children Mary Louisa Artemisia (b. ca. 1829), Amanda Melvina FitzAllen (b. ca. 1831), John Alfred Ragland (b. ca. 1833), Virginia Ingram (Puss) (b. ca. 1840), and Maria Bressie Vaughan (Pocahontas) (b. July 16, 1841), had moved to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, by 1850. Dr. Hewell was engaged in farming in near Tuscaloosa.
Between 1850 and 1856, Susan Hewell was employed as a teacher, possibly at a female academy in Shuqalak, Noxubee County, Mississippi. She married William Potts at her father’s home in Tuscaloosa on December 17, 1856. He died not long after their marriage.
Susan Hewell Potts married Mississippi governor John Jones Pettus in Tuscaloosa County on August 13, 1861. For the next three years, Governor Pettus was concerned with defending the Mississippi state capital, moving it twice during the Civil War. For safety reasons, he sent Susan Pettus and her stepchildren, Alice, Ginnie, Mary W. (Willie), and William Pettus, to his plantation near Scooba, Lauderdale County, Mississippi.
Governor Pettus left his family and went into hiding in Arkansas in May 1865. Susan Pettus and her stepchildren continued living on the plantation near Scooba until January 1866, when they moved to a Sumter County home owned by Alabama governor John Anthony Winston. Governor Winston was probably the brother of Pamela Winston Pettus, the first wife of John Jones Pettus. Susan Pettus and her stepson, William, were briefly reunited with Governor Pettus at the Arkansas home of a friend, John Jones, on January 6, 1867. Governor Pettus died on January 25, 1867, and was interred in a field near the Jones home in Arkansas. Susan and William Pettus were residing in Prairie County, Arkansas, in May 1867.
Susan Pettus had moved to Cadiz, Kentucky, by July 1888 to live with her widowed sister, Amanda Hewell Street. They visited their sister, Pocahontas Hewell Whitt, at Wood Lawn, a home located near Selma, Dallas County, Alabama, in December 1888. Susan Pettus was living with her sister, Pocahontas, in March 1889 but had returned to Tuscaloosa by 1901. She probably died in Tuscaloosa on July 18, 1909.
http://mdah.state.ms.us/manuscripts/z2251.html
